The current language systems include those having finite alphabet sets, such as Roman or English, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, or Russian. The other widely-used written form of communication consists of an ideographic character set used by the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean-speaking people. As is well known, ideographic character sets, and in particular the Oriental set, are open-ended, since each ideogram may be composed of one or more root ideograms. It is estimated that the classical Chinese character set has in excess of sixty thousand different characters.
It is to be understood, for purposes of this invention, that the word "ideogram" is used to generically described the pictograms representing, albeit somewhat fancifully, the item being described, the composite pictogram consisting of two or more pictograms or two other ideograms, and finally the third generalized form of an ideogram. This third generalized form is comprised of a radical or root component which indicates the general semantic character of the word, for example, a plant, a tree, or a bird, and a phonogram or phonetic component that indicates the general pronunciation of the word and thereby specifies which member of the generic character is being represented. For example, if one looks at various types of birds, such as the oriole, the chicken, or the seagull, the root component for a bird is found in each case.
Generally speaking, all ideographic characters, whether they are a single ideogram or a composite ideogram, are substantially the same size. This requires the root ideograms that make up a composite ideogram to be compressed in size, either by narrowing the vertical or horizontal dimension, or by a general overall compression. It is important that, during the size reduction, intelligence contained in the character is not lost. Portions of the character such as serifs may contain important information, and by eliminating a serif, the entire meaning of the character can be changed.
An ideogram generator that accomplishes the compression of ideographic root characters without losing intelligence is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,408,199 issued Oct. 4, 1983 to Douglass A. White, Susan J. Moore, and David F. Clark and assigned to the assignee of this invention.
While the ideogram generator disclosed in the aforesaid patent surpasses the capability of previously-developed automated ideographic typing systems, both in number of keystroke per character and in versatility, it does not provide to the user an intermediate view of the composite ideogram being developed. Other ideographic word processors or typing systems also provide only the finished character or the components. For example, if the composite ideogram is composed of three root ideograms with one root ideogram disposed above the other two ideograms which are in themselves disposed side by side, the user must envision positioning and the final structure of the ideogram in order to properly key in the desired composite ideogram. If the user makes a mistake, either in keying in the shape operators that reduce the size of the root ideograms, or in keying in the root ideograms themselves, this is not discovered until the entire series of coded strings have been entered into the system. As a result, the developed character may be improperly compressed or alternatively, be comprises of the wrong root ideograms. It should be apparent that this "misspelling" results in a complete erasure and reconstruction of the desired composite ideogram.
A second shortcoming of existing ideogram generators is the failure to take into account the natural order of writing used in Oriental ideographic character sets. Specifically, one writes from the top down and from the left to the right, and from the outside to the inside. While this can be simulated in the aforedescribed patent, the "feel" and "see" that corresponds to the hand construction of ideographic characters is missing. In the aforedescribed reference, the character, while it may be constructed in the order just denoted and may be displayed component by component, magically appears in its developed form once the last series of coded characters is entered and a delimiter is indicated to show the end of the character. As previously noted, if a mistake is entered during the construction of the character, this may not be determined until the final result of the character is displayed, either on the screen or the printer.
Since it is known that the ideographic character set used by the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans may be broken down into a workable number of root components such as is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,408,199, it would be appropriate to provide a display system that permits viewing of the composite character as it is constructed by the user so that, not only will the user view the elements of the composite character as it is being constructed, but further will get a feel for the natural method of writing in an ideographic character set.